Tiger Geocoder -
UPDATE In PostGIS 2.0, we have packaged an updated Tiger version that works with Tiger 2010 data. It is also now incorporated in the
official PostGIS documentation: Extras Tiger Geocoder section and in addition sports a
reverse geocoder and revised to not use deprecated functions. You can find it in the extras folder of the postgis tar ball and also directly from PostGIS subversion repository.
The tiger geocoder packaged with PostGIS 1.5 and below is a bit old and doesn't handle the new US census data ESRI shapefile format first introduced in Tiger 2007 set. We encourage you to use the newer one currently available via a Stephen Frost's GIT repository http://www.snowman.net/git/tiger_geocoder/. Please note that the load scripts packaged require PostgreSQL 8.3+ to use. We will be going over the new version of the geocoder that has been improved on by Steve and his friends.
You can download a GIT client from http://git-scm.com/tools. If you are familiar with TortoiseSVN and are on windows, TortoiseGIT might be the easiest to work with for you.
We have modified Steve's version slightly to work with the Tiger 2009 data and also added a slightly different loader approach. Our version of the code can be downloaded from Tiger geocoder 2009 with additional loader scripts.
The loader scripts currently in GIT are Linux centric. We will be demonstrating a table-driven custom tiger loader that will work both on Windows and Linux using table data driven techniques that use SQL to generate OS specific command line scripts. The select statement will look something like
SELECT loader_generate_script(ARRAY['MA','ME'], 'windows');
and will generate a suitable command line script that will
download data from census for selected states, extract, and load data into a PostGIS db with suitable geocoder table structures.